India, a Nation of More Than 1 Billion ‘Fools’

Justice Markandey Katju, a former Supreme Court Justice turned chairman of the Press Council of India, has done it again. Already known for his recent views of the journalists he oversees – they “are of a very poor intellectual level” – he has widened the focus of his condemnation to include approximately 1.08 billion anonymous Indians.

Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

An Indian dressed as a clown at the ‘Great Bombay Circus’ show in Bangalore, Jan. 28, 2011.

That’s our calculation based on India’s estimated total population, but we made it after Mr. Katju stated in an Indian Express op-ed Monday that he was presenting us with an “unpleasant truth: 90 per cent of Indians are fools.” He was humble enough to attribute a “great defect” to himself, too, though it was one couched in virtue: “ I cannot remain silent when I see my country going downhill. Even if others are deaf and dumb, I am not. So I will speak out.”

And speak out he did.

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His first example for reaching his controversial conclusion: “When our people go to vote in elections, 90 per cent vote on the basis of caste or community, not the merits of the candidate. That is why Phoolan Devi, a known dacoit-cum-murderer, was elected to Parliament — because she belonged to a backward caste that had a large number of voters in that constituency.”

Example no. 2: “90 per cent Indians believe in astrology, which is pure superstition and humbug. Even a little common sense tells us that the movements of stars and planets have nothing to do with our lives. Yet, TV channels showing astrology have high TRP ratings.”

Example no. 3: “Cricket has been turned into a religion by our corporatised media, and most people lap it up like opium. The real problems facing 80 per cent of the people are socio-economic — poverty, unemployment, malnourishment, price rise, lack of healthcare, education, housing etc.”

Example no. 4: “I had criticised the media hype around Dev Anand’s death at a time when 47 farmers in India were committing suicide on an average every day for the last 15 years… In my opinion, Dev Anand’s films transported the minds of poor people to a world of make-believe, like a hill station where Dev Anand was romancing some girl.”

Example no. 5: “During the recent Anna Hazare agitation in Delhi, the media hyped the event as a solution to the problem of corruption. In reality it was, as Shakespeare said in Macbeth, “…a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”

Mr. Katju says his intention behind his harsh critique is very noble. “When I called 90 per cent of them fools my intention was not to harm them, rather it was just the contrary. I want to see Indians prosper, I want poverty and unemployment abolished, I want the standard of living of the 80 per cent poor Indians to rise so that they get decent lives,” he writes.

Mr. Katju says these “90%” of Indians can be cured of their foolishness by twin doses of scientific and modern thinking, by which he means being logical and rational, that can rid their minds of “casteism, communalism and superstition.”

We reached Mr. Katju, 65 years old, by phone Monday to ask whether his 90% estimate was derived from scientific thinking. He told India Real Time: “It’s not a mathematical figure. It just means that a large proportion of Indians are mentally backward.”

Such statements are nothing new for a justice who has made his name speaking his mind – over and over again – since taking over as the chairman of the Press Council of India Oct. 5. The council is the government’s media watchdog with statutory, quasi-judicial authority headed by a retired senior judge with representatives from the media, Parliament and elsewhere as its members. Its power is limited to censuring journalists and news outlets for what it sees as journalistic excesses, though Mr. Katju has been arguing since taking office that the government should give the council “more teeth” and the electronic media should also be brought under the council’s ambit.

He also took a swipe in January at Salman Rushdie’s decision not to participate in the Jaipur Literature Festival following threats to his life from Islamic extremists. Mr. Katju dismissed Mr. Rushdie as a “poor writer,” according to a Mail Today report. According to the report, Mr. Katju said that “the problem with some ‘educated Indians’ was that they still suffered from ‘colonial inferiority complex’” and therefore believe Indian writers are inferior to those who live in London or New York.

In his Indian Express article Monday, Mr. Katju expanded on remarks he made at a March 24 function at New Delhi’s Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, a private education trust. During his speech there, he took it upon himself to criticize a wide range of subjects beloved of millions of Indians: from cricket to Sachin Tendulkar to film actor Dev Anand to activist Anna Hazare, according to a report in The Hindu.

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